“... it was three years before he felt able to admit the scale of the disaster. ‘By the beginning of May 1988,’ he wrote to party members, ‘we lost 13,310 troops in Afghanistan; 35,478 Soviet officers and soldiers were wounded, many of whom became disabled; 301 are missing in action … Afghan losses, naturally, were much heavier, including the losses among ...”

“... matches form and content’; the Evening Standard’s reviewer feared that she ‘may not read a better book all year’ and the Independent won’t ‘be surprised to see this new novel on shortlists in 2011’. Equally, her second non-fiction book, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998), about her mother’s dementia, won the Mind Book of the Year ...”

“... stoppage’, congestion, stomach cramps and ‘irritated nerves’. Of the 1275 days between 14 May 1875 and the end of November 1878, Bismarck spent 772 either on his estates or at spas. Yet the real cost of his rule, Steinberg suggests, was borne by German political culture itself. Bismarck bullied his colleagues and subordinates (indeed, he found the two ...”

“... eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations– though we may be a relic population. Boomtowns also drive out people who perform essential services for relatively modest salaries, the teachers, firefighters, mechanics and carpenters, along with people who might have time for civic engagement. I look in wonder at the ...”

“... Israeli orchestra that demonised Haneen Zoabi’s protest against the Israeli siege of Gaza in May 2010 when she boarded the cruise ship Mavi Marmara, which was part of the flotilla that aimed to break the siege. Israeli commandos raided the ship in international waters and in clashes with passengers, whom Israel called ‘terrorists’, nine Turkish ...”

“... safety goals would also lead to greater discipline in cost controls and operations’. He may have been right. ExxonMobil still causes serious disasters – in 2006, for instance, an underground storage tank at one of its service stations in Jacksonville, Maryland leaked 24,000 gallons of gasoline into the local groundwater supply – but it keeps ...”

“... ruling out the possibility that the spores of C. fraxinea, like the midges that carry Bluetongue, may well cover long distances in the right circumstances – a good breeze over a mass of warm water, between the Dutch coast and the coast of Suffolk, say. Finally the fungus is not easy to identify: it is a close relative, or possibly a pathogenic phase, of ...”

“... jazz musicians in Los Angeles, to the flowering of his skill and corresponding fame. Rick Martin may be pliable in the rest of his life – ‘he always did what somebody else thought up’ – but in playing the horn he ‘shed the husk of indifference’, and he becomes purposeful, even headstrong. He suffers no spasms of self-doubt: he knew ‘he was good ...”

“... she most longs to be – an artist, a writer, someone who speaks to the world and is heard? It may seem like an old-fashioned problem (of course she can!), yet it’s a real one, and to investigate it Zambreno looks back at an old-fashioned world, to perhaps the origin of the possibility of wife-and (and-writer, and-genius): the early 20th century. She ...”

“... his true and better nature when he joined the great cause of opposition to Philip. Worthington may have promised a critical inquiry that would avoid the moralising of the past, but his account is only slightly more nuanced in its approval of Demosthenes than those of his predecessors. He passes hurriedly over problematic twists and turns in the late phase ...”

“... on the shoulders by two plain-clothes policemen. In The Removal (1928, above), a family that may have overstretched itself by renting a house with a small front garden is being evicted for non-payment – an event Lowry, a rent collector by profession, must have witnessed often, perhaps often initiated. Their furniture is outside, divided into two ...”

“... a ticket at the official rate,’ he boasted to me, ‘and Iksanov says I can’t dance.’* In May, his lawyer threatened to sue the theatre in response to the reprimands he had received from Iksanov for speaking out. On 7 June, Zavtra broke the news that his two contracts with the Bolshoi, as performer and teacher, had been cancelled. The next day he ...”

“... sien come il fruscìo che fan le foglie del gelso ne la man di chi le coglie silenzioso … (‘May my words in the evening be refreshing to you, like the rustling of mulberry leaves in the hand of one who silently gathers them.’) Parts of his 1903 sequence Le città del silenzio, a kind of poetic gazetteer of historic Italian towns, have worked their way ...”

“... organisation: if the Surgeon and Weitz say they are now Orthodox, everyone follows suit. But there may also be a pragmatic aspect to their new faith. In the 2000s international biker gangs began to consider spreading their influence in Russia. Most prominent among them were the Bandidos, who offered to make the Night Wolves their local chapter. The Night ...”

“... and leave a note declaring that life outside the Party was unthinkable (as some had done): this may have looked like devotion to the Party, but in reality it just showed a lack of courage, an unwillingness to fight for a reversal of the decision. The rhetoric was harsher when the suicide was a prominent member of the opposition whose death seemed intended ...”